Archive for the ‘EPA’ category

(According to Democrats.org, “We will work to build a stronger rural and agricultural economy. Great! Perhaps they will send President Reject Obama with a small row boat to “navigate” some of the mud puddles and irrigation ditches WOTUS declared “navigable waters.” — DM)

Ron Sachs/CNP/MediaPunch/IP

American Farm Bureau Foundation warned that a plain-reading of WOTUS meant that federal regulatory control could be asserted over any land surface that had ever experienced rain flow, had been flooded, or had irrigation ditches. Farmers argued that the federal regulatory redefinition could usurp state control of water use for America’s entire 247,417,282 acres used in row-crop cultivation.

************************

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Tuesday, to the delight of rural America, that the Trump administration is moving to rescind the Obama era’s “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) regulatory rule.

WOTUS gave the federal government effective authority over water use on 247 million acres of American farmland.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, together with Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Douglas Lamont, signed a proposed regulatory rescission of WOTUS. As soon as the proposed rule change can be published in the Federal Register, under Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OW-2017-0203, the public will have a 30-day comment period to “review and revise” the definition of “waters of the United States.”

The EPA took to Twitter at #WOTUS to call its action a significant step to return power to states and provide regulatory certainty to the nation’s farmers and businesses. The EPA added that its decision is consistent with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on February 28, aimed at “Restoring the Rule of Law, Federalism, and Economic Growth by Reviewing the ‘Waters of the United States’ Rule.”

The Obama administration’s WOTUS regulatory expansion cleverly redefined the term “navigable waters” to include “intermittent streams.” Environmental activists hailed the WOTUS’s expansion of federal jurisdiction over land and water use as an essential common-sense-rule to protect water for wildlife and drinking water supplies for 117 million Americans.

But the American Farm Bureau Foundation warned that a plain-reading of WOTUS meant that federal regulatory control could be asserted over any land surface that had ever experienced rain flow, had been flooded, or had irrigation ditches. Farmers argued that the federal regulatory redefinition could usurp state control of water use for America’s entire 247,417,282 acres used in row-crop cultivation.

The basis for federal jurisdiction over “navigable waters” lies in the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause [Article 1, Section 8], which gives the federal government extensive authority to regulate interstate commerce. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case of Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), that federal law has precedence in licensing vessels that moved in and out of U.S. ports.

The Commerce Clause was expanded with the passage of the “Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899,” which forbid building any unauthorized obstruction to the nation’s “navigable waters” and gave enforcement powers to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

President Nixon tremendously expanded the Commerce Clause with the passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972, which was supposed to create a national policy that would protect America’s public drinking water supply from contamination.

There currently are 18 federal lawsuits in various U.S. District Courts and about 22 federal appeals court petitions in various districts over WOTUS. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued a nationwide stay on October 9, 2015 against WOTUS’s enforcement under the Clean Water Act. The case was quickly appealed and the Supreme Court decided to take the case just days before the Trump inauguration Day

California’s U.S. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy released the following statement:

The Waters of the U.S. rule was a ridiculous usurpation of power by the EPA—so ridiculous that bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate voted to overturn the rule last year. The federal government has no right to regulate intermittent streams, creeks, and ponds, especially when that water is on private property. The Trump Administration’s decision today to withdraw this rule makes things right by getting Washington out of what it had no right to be involved with in the first place.

Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) issued the following statement:

The West has finally won in the battle over the Obama administration’s WOTUS rule. This regulation would have been a disaster for the West and rural communities across the country, giving Washington near-total control over water resources. The livelihoods of American farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs were at stake. I applaud the Trump administration for siding with American jobs and rescinding this harmful rule.

(Accident? Why of course. Not only that, but the Easter Bunny wrote the press release and Hillary is our President. Methinks the EPA swamp and multiple other agency swamps need draining. Not “soon.” Now. — DM)

FILE – In this March 16, 2017, file photo, proposals for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in President Donald Trump’s first budget are displayed at the Government Printing Office in Washington.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday sent out a press release touting praise for President Trump’s rollback of Obama-era climate-change regulations this week — but the agency accidentally led the email with a blistering quote from a Democratic critic.

The press release includes a quote from Sen. Tom Carper, Delaware Democrat and ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, wrongly attributed to Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican.

The email, titled “What They Are Saying About President Trump’s Executive Order on Energy Independence,” opens with a complete and total takedown of that order.

“With this executive order, President Trump has chosen to recklessly bury his head in the sand. Walking away from the Clean Power Plan and other climate initiatives, including critical resiliency projects is not just irresponsible — it’s irrational,” reads the quote by Mr. Carper but listed as coming from Ms. Capito.

Today’s executive order calls into question America’s credibility and our commitment to tackling the greatest environmental challenge of our lifetime,” it continues. “With the world watching, President Trump and [EPA] Administrator [Scott] Pruitt have chosen to shirk our responsibility, disregard clear science and undo the significant progress our country has made to ensure we leave a better, more sustainable planet for generations to come.”

The agency quickly sent out a revised press release correcting the embarrassing error.

It has always been worrisome to me that every so-called solution to global warming subverts rather than enhances human freedom and advances the power of the state to regulate energy, industrial activity, and individual behavior. That seems to me, a denier, or whatever term you want to use, a potentially greater threat to the future of human welfare than even climate change. Václav Klaus, the former president of the Czech Republic, made this same point when he declared: “What is at risk is not the climate but freedom.”

****************************

A few days ago I had a conversation with a very smart university professor of history and somehow the climate change subject came up. Almost instantly he responded to my thoughts by saying: “You must be one of those deniers who rejects the science consensus.”

This is the new form of intellectual bullying and it’s intentionally designed is to stop the conversation not advance it. In the academies it is a technique to close off scientific inquiry.

When the liberals talk of ‎consensus, what consensus are they talking about? Of whom? About what? Here is John Kay of the‎ Financial Times on the so-called consensus:

Science is a matter of evidence, not what a majority of scientists think…. The notion of a monolithic “science,” meaning what scientists say, is pernicious and the notion of “scientific consensus” actively so. The route to knowledge is transparency in disagreement and openness in debate. The route to truth is the pluralist expression of conflicting views in which, often not as quickly as we might like, good ideas drive out bad. There is no room in this process for any notion of “scientific consensus.”

Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, has noted that too many environmentalists “ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.”

Then he adds: “… there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition.… The consensus was reached before the research was even begun…”

Kay and Lindzen are not alone. In an open letter to the Canadian Prime Minister, 60 scientists urged caution when it comes to any policy with regard to climate:

While the confident pronouncements of scientifically unqualified environmental groups may provide for sensational headlines, they are no basis for mature policy formation.… There is no “consensus” among climate scientists about the relative importance of the various causes of global climate change.… “Climate change is real” is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural noise.

Patrick Moore, a Ph.D. in ecology, is a fallen-away founder of Greenpeace. The following is from his 2015 lecture, “Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?”

There is no definite scientific proof, through real-world observation that carbon dioxide is responsible for any of the slight warming in the global climate that has occurred during the past 300 years, since the peak of the Little Ice Age.… The contention that human emissions are now the dominant influence on climate is simply a hypothesis, rather than a universally accepted scientific theory. It is therefore correct, indeed verging on compulsory in a scientific tradition, to be skeptical of those who express certainty that “the science is settled” and “the debate is over.”

The world’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is hopelessly conflicted by its makeup and its mandate from the United Nations. It is required only to focus on “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the atmosphere, and which is in addition to natural climate variability.” So if the IPCC found that climate change was not being affected by human alteration of the atmosphere or that it is not “dangerous,” there would be no need for it to exist. It is virtually mandated to find on the side of apocalypse.

The IPCC states that it is “extremely likely” that human emissions have been the dominant cause of global warming “since the mid-20th century,” that is since 1950. It claims that “extremely” means 95% certain, even though the number 95 was simply plucked from the air like an act of magic. And “likely” is not a scientific word but rather indicative of a judgment, another word for opinion.

“Perpetual repetition.” “Unqualified environmental groups.” “Sensational headlines.” This is what mass movements are all about. From his book, The True Believer, here is Eric Hoffer on mass movements:

Hatred is the most assessable and comprehensive of all the unifying agents.… Mass movements can rise and spread without the belief in God but never without the belief in evil.

By the way, isn’t this what the left accuses the Trump movement to be all about?

Hoffer then goes on to cite the historian F.A. Voigt’s account of a Japanese mission to Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist Movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought. He replied, “It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.” This brought a bit of clarity as to why the mass movement, rather brilliantly, wants to label those of us who have questions as “deniers.”

There are two things necessary for a mass movement to succeed: true believers and a well-defined enemy. The enemy of the climate change mass movement is fossil fuels and the Industrial Age, with the “deniers” being the enablers of planetary destruction.

In the past, the term “denier” has been associated with that extreme group who denies the existence of the horrible, tragic historical fact, the Holocaust. Many climate change true believers want the public to put anyone who questions or disagrees with climate change projections in the same category as the Holocaust deniers. But one is a fact, the other a contested projection. Nevertheless, they have been quite successful.

Here is one of the definitions of “denier” found on the Internet: “a person who denies something, especially someone who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of the scientific or historical evidence: a prominent denier of global warming.”

Here is Hoffer’s warning on the role of the true believer: “where mass movements can either persuade or coerce, it usually chooses the latter.”

Something we are seeing in spades.

The last paragraph of Friedrich Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize address, The Pretense of Knowledge, puts the climate change mass movement and its true believers into frightening perspective:

There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, “dizzy with success,” to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will.

It has always been worrisome to me that every so-called solution to global warming subverts rather than enhances human freedom and advances the power of the state to regulate energy, industrial activity, and individual behavior. That seems to me, a denier, or whatever term you want to use, a potentially greater threat to the future of human welfare than even climate change. Václav Klaus, the former president of the Czech Republic, made this same point when he declared: “What is at risk is not the climate but freedom.”

President-elect Donald Trump is planning to nominate Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt – an outspoken critic of the EPA – to lead the environmental agency, a senior transition source confirmed to Fox News.

Word of Trump’s choice for the Environmental Protection Agency came as the president-elect also named Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad as his pick for ambassador to China and asked retired Gen. John Kelly to lead the Department of Homeland Security.

Pruitt may be the most controversial pick of the three.

Pruitt, 48, has been a reliable booster of the fossil fuel industry and a critic of what he derides as the EPA’s “activist agenda.”

Representing his state as attorney general since 2011, Pruitt has repeatedly sued the EPA to roll back environmental regulations and other health protections. He joined with other Republican attorneys general in opposing the Clean Power Plan, which seeks to limit planet-warming carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. Pruitt has argued that curbing carbon emissions would trample the sovereignty of state governments, drive up electricity rates, threaten the reliability of the nation’s power grid and “create economic havoc.”

His installment, if confirmed, would mark a significant break with the current EPA approach toward global warming.

In an opinion article published earlier this year by National Review, Pruitt suggested the debate over global warming “is far from settled” and claimed “scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”

He also filed court briefs in support of the Keystone XL Pipeline project blocked by the Obama administration, which would have run through his state. And Pruitt sued the EPA over the agency’s recently expansion of water bodies regulated under the federal Clean Water Act, which has been opposed by industries that would be forced to clean up contaminated wastewater.

“Respect for private property rights have allowed our nation to thrive, but with the recently finalized rule, farmers, ranchers, developers, industry and individual property owners will now be subject to the unpredictable, unsound and often byzantine regulatory regime of the EPA,” Pruitt said last year.

Public Citizen called him a “terrible choice,” saying in a statement: “Pruitt is cozy with the oil and gas industry and treats the EPA like an enemy.”

Business leaders in his home state, however, lauded Pruitt’s selection, especially those in the oil and gas industry.

“Scott Pruitt is a businessman and public servant and understands the impact regulation and legislation have in the business world,” said Jeffrey McDougall, chairman of the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association. “His appointment will put rational and reasonable regulation at the forefront.”